Rainy

How to spell rainy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rainy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rainy mean?

1. adjectiveMarked by or bringing a lot of rain.

Rainy in a sentence

• We kept the umbrellas by the door all through the rainy season.

• A cold and rainy afternoon kept the children indoors.

Where does rainy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word rain descends from the Old English regn, the native Germanic term for water falling from the sky, with close cousins in Dutch regen and German Regen. Adding the productive Old English adjective ending -ig, which survives today as -y and means 'full of' or 'marked by', produced the form that became rainy, literally 'full of rain'. This same -y ending sits on countless weather words such as cloudy, windy, and frosty, all built on the same simple recipe. The spelling stays comfortingly regular: the silent letters of many English words are absent here, and the trap, if any, is simply remembering that the final letter is a single y. Because both rain and -y are among the oldest layers of the language, the word has changed very little in centuries.

How the word is built

• rain (from Old English regn: water falling from clouds)
• -y (adjective suffix meaning 'full of' or 'characterised by')